Nothing like it has
been seen since the heyday of the Bor­gias. The
Venice Film Festi­val, which can be as peaceful as its leafy, wave-washed
setting on the Lido, this year came on like
gangbusters.

Act 1. (buildup to the
festival). Fest Chief Guglielmo Biraghi – you can rec­ognize
him by the knives sticking out of his back – gets re-elected by the skin of
his teeth. The bloody opposition is led by Christian Democrats on the Venice
committee, including our old friend Gian
Luigi Rondi (former festi­val capo). As
1988 progresses, every name you can think of is thrown for­ward to replace Signor Biraghi. Finally Biraghi gets the nod and a four-year contract, proving
only what everyone knew: He was the right man for the job.

Act 2. The Last
Temptation of Christ. Martin Scorsese's
hot gospel is selected for the festival. Catholics are shocked. Cardinals go
berserk. The Vatican sends smoke through its roof. Franco (Jesus of Nazareth)Zeffirelli is so out­raged by Scorsese's
film that he hasn't seen it. Even so, he threatens to with­draw his own
Venice entry, Young Toscanini,a.k.a. The Last Temptation of Liz Taylor. The brouhaha runs right
up to the movie's showing.

Act 3. The movies, thank
heaven, are on the up-and-up at Venice. Under the former director
what's-his-name, the average Mostra
lineup
resembled less a dish to set before a Golden Lion than something dragged in
by the moggy. Biraghi has
changed much, including the old mandatory attempt at international
evenhandedness. This meant that a good third-choice Ameri­can film had to
give way to, say, a clinker from Brunei that was its coun­try's first choice.
And to discourage nationalist tokenism, the competition films were not
country by country, but by director. Hallelujah. At last a long-awaited
breach in the wall of filmfest jingoism.

The whole point of
these events, surely, is to showcase cinema's power as a global language.
Venice's filmmakers seem more than ever trying to make pictures speak louder
than words: showing language dissolving in the existential void
(Angelopoulos' Land­scape of Mist),throwing dialogue in the air like clay pigeons, only
to be shot down by the truer aim of telltale looks or gestures (Mike Leigh's High
Hopes,David Mamet'sThings Change),or dis­carding dialogue and commentary alto­gether,
as in OtarIoseliani's
50-minute documentary, A Little Monastery in Tuscany.

This was the best film
at Venice. The Russian-Georgian helmer whose last pic Favorites of the Moon was the toast of
Venice, '84, once more scatters a 'structureless'
series of images and anecdotes across the screen. It is silent cinema with
incidental sounds. (Dogs barking, bells tolling, psalms chanting, scraps of
semi-audible conversation). Five white-robed monks hew out their days of
prayer and devotion, punctuated with farm-working, wine-making, meals, and walks
through the town, scored for Ciaos and Buon
giornos. We also glimpse the
local peasants gather­ing olives, the local hunters killing wild pigs, the
local abattoir slinging its knives, the local gentry genteelly dining.

The Conspiracy of
Consumption, satirized as a minuet of whirling sub­plots in Favorites of
the Moon,here
embraces everyone from monks to meat-hackers to Lords of the Manor. But
nothing is overtly condemned by A Little Monastery in Tuscany. Ioseliani lets the images speak for themselves. The
simplicity may be disingenuous – we know what the Russian director is up to;
as in Favorites he's knocking the consumer­ist West. But he does it
with the geniality of a child pretending com­plete innocence.

The 'silent cinema' of
Theo Angelopoulos is much noisier. This is muteness
as a multi-megaton weapon. His new movie Landscape of Mist,like his last The
Beekeeper, isa
journey film. Two kids, a 5-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl, run away
from home to seek Dad in Germany but never get there. Instead these orphans
of the existential storm gloom through a Greece ridden with ghastly weather
and endure rape, despair, and a few limited snatches of conversation. Once
more Angelopoulos puts up the odd stunning image and uniquely cele­brates
Greece as a land of gray, mia­smic, sodden majesty. But the movie's
minimalist deliberateness is finally more wearing than winning. So are the
dunking Greek-myth parallels just beneath the surface. The young man from a
traveling theater who befriends the two children and rescues them from danger
is called Orest. Back in the days of The
Traveling Players,Angelopoulos
had a fluid epic vision that convincingly commanded both modern Greek reality
and ancient Greek myth. Today the vision has become fogged with clichés of aliena­tion
and anomie, post-deluge Antonioni.

The strongest movies –
and stron­gest moments in weaker movies – were nearly always those where an
elo­quent camera stole the attention from a stammering script.

GezaBelemenyi'sEldorado,a two-hour trawl through post-war
Hungarian history, has a couple of brilliant scenes where the serpentine questings of a Steadycam catch
the queasy flow of political volatility. In Chabrol'sUne Affaire de Femmes,with Isabelle Hup­pert as a
housewife in occupied France who gets rich by performing illegal abortions
(and ends up on the guillo­tine), yards of verbal character-exposi­tion
alternate with – and are suddenly mocked by – an inspiringly sly, ambiva­lent
closeup of La Huppert. (No actress is better at
expressing everything when seeming to express nothing). And from Italy, Pasquale Squittieri'sGli Invisi­bili – Red Brigade radicalism and prison riots –
has major verbosity problems except when the hand-held camera swings into
action and creates a brilliant tour de force of an SAS-style prison storming.

Elsewhere from Italian
cinema: Pier Paolo Pasolini's massive achievement
was honored in a retrospective titled Una
Cinema
di Poesia,restoring several cut
or dropped episodes from his story-cycle trilogy. It presaged modern Italy's
hit-and-miss flair for the cinema of actuality. Not just Gli Invisibili but Marco Giordano's Appuntamento a Liv­erpool. In this fictional
story, a girl who has lost her dad in Belgium's Heyssel
Stadium disaster – when English foot­ball fans ran amok and caused 39 deaths,
mostly Italian – charges off to Liverpool to track down the hooligan
responsible. Headline realism exists with movie hokum: The mixture's vari­able
but lively.

The bad news comes
from old pal Ermanno Olmi. His latest film The
Legend of the Holy Drinker isa typical Olmi tale of the kiss of
the sanctity bestowed on the common man. But the interweaving of the
miraculous everyday – which gave a glow to The Tree of Wooden Clogs and
Camminacammina – ishere
reiterated as if by rote. Deep in co-production Paris, where mismatched
accents clash by day and by night, dwells boozy hobo Rutger Hauer. One day he receives a
200-franc handout from mystery phi­lanthropist Anthony Quayle with only one condition:
Pay the money back by giving it to a certain church as soon as possible after
Sunday mass.

Of course Hauer, deep
into Paris' latest Beaujolais consignment and dis­tracted by other matters (a
mistress, a sponging friend), keeps missing the appointment. The film drags
on like some demented Guy de Maupassantstory,
pouring out its non-vintage ironies as if no one can say `when' and putting
its post-dubbed English dia­logue through the mangler of
diverse accents: English, Dutch, Italian, French.

Holy Drinker isOlmi's visually dull­est
film in decades: directed in the plonk-plonk style
of TV drama. Its por­trait of Hauer
as
a manqué saint – a man called to holiness but reaching out with ever-missing
fingers – never has the images or performances to convince. Olmi uses
professional actors for the first time since A Man Called John,and it shows. It's his
most synthetic film since.

Neither David Mamet'sThings Change nor Mike Leigh's High
Hopes have soaring visuals. But both use images brilliantly as boobytraps for truth, ambushing the vanities or follies
of human speech. In Don Ameche's performance, Mamet's shoeshine hero hijacked by the Mafia has a whole
armory of gestures and facial responses – from basset hound bewil­derment to
sly-stirring guile – that play against the gnomic plainsong of Mamet's dialogue. (The spoken Italian is all cod-Italian,
except for one tiny gangster who speaks bona fide Sicilian). And Mike Leigh's
film, a prankish paper dart sent buzzing around Thatcher's Britain, uses its char­acters'
faces and often manic body lan­guage as satiric comment on the groping,
well-meaning banalities of their dialogue.

As it happens, the
festival itself was becoming radioactive at this point. An Australian movie
arrived, crackling mysteriously, that proved the explosive revelation of the mostra.

John Hillcoat'sGhosts...of the Civil Dead is a prison pic set in an Awful Warning near-future. Stoked by the
authorities – who want to trigger police-state powers – unrest grows in a
high-security desert penitentiary. Hillcoat stages
this tale of crescent anarchy less like a down-under Riot in Cell Block 11than a mock documentary with touches of Kubrick
and Genet. (How's that for a twosome?) The multi-view narrative, hi-tech
images, and eerily disem­bodied sounds – while watching events in one part of
the jail we hear conver­sations from another – half suggest a 2001 of
the penal system. The shockproof candor and grim surreal humor of the movie's
picture of drug abuse, sex, and prisoner-to-prisoner violence suggest the
shade of Genet hovering over the outback. Combining structural daring with
thumping emo­tional power, this film is the best news from Australian cinema
since the hey­day of the Aussie New Wave.

Also raining welcome
fallout over Venice were two Spanish-language comedies. Pedro Almodóvar'sWomen on the Verge
of a Nervous Breakdown won friends, influenced people, and revised
recipes for gazpachosoup. This Spanish film also copped Best
Script prize at about the same time it opened the New York Filmfest. And
from Cuba, Fernando Birri's Gabriel García Marquez adaptation, The Old Man with
Enormous Wings,rejoiced
in images of crazy poetry, notably in a fantasy sequence designed by painter Manuel Mendive.

Nor did the Venice
Lion's roarings stop here. First of all there was
Wacky Weekend, which centered around three films by semi-distin­guished
directors, each nuttier than the last and showing you don't need a writers'
strike to produce airheaded scripts. Monte Hellman'sIguana has
Everest McGill as the lizard-faced lord of a deserted Pacific island, who
speaks with the oddest cockney accent since Archie Leach. Did we say
`deserted' island? Actually, every ship in the hemi­sphere seems to pass by,
coughing up castaways for McGill's cruel kingdom – beheadings and amputations
a specialty. Only the newly washed-up Car­men (MaruValdivielso) can come between old reptile-face and
his thirst for blood. But even she has to listen to orders like "Suck me
till I cum all over your beautiful dress." Since the com­pletion of this
film, Iguana Island has been dropped from many package holi­day brochures.

Ivan Passer's Haunted
Summer is Ken Russell's Gothic revisited in the sober light of
Cannon Pic platitude. Here are Byron, Shelley, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairemont,
and Doctor Polidori gath­ered round Lake Geneva to
spout epi­grams and swap sex partners. Never mind about the writing of poetry
or the creation of Frankenstein and The Vam­pyre. Lewis John Carlino's script cer­tainly doesn't. But there are
memorable moments. Best one: a high-flying, finely tooled speech about art
and beauty by Shelley (Eric Stoltz), which receives a long stare from Byron and
then a single word riposte, "Bollocks."

Franco Zeffirelli'sYoung Toscanini,however, beats the field.
The self-appointed Scorsese-chastiser makes a tenfold fool of himself with
this prodi­gious piece of tosh. What do you do but
goggle in disbelief – or giggle with illicit pleasure – at a movie that has
the great Italian baton-waver (C. Thomas How­ell) caught in a monsoon of bio-pic fatuities?

When rain-swept Arturo is not con­ducting a storm at sea to the
imaginary strains of Wagner's Liebestod, he's
lob­bing Great Ideas about art and politics in the general direction of
Elizabeth Taylor (as soprano Nadina Bulkhova). Miss Taylor, when not coping with Arturo's Great Ideas –
her comeback at one point is as good as Byron's: "Aw shuttuppp" – dons brownface
and a ten gallon Afro wig to sing Aida. (Big
improvement in your voice since A Lit­tle Night Music,Liz).

Yet the evening's
loudest hoot from a Venice audience increasingly surren­dering to mirth comes
when La Taylor stops the opera in mid-Triumph scene to make a speech. We're
in slave-own­ing Brazil in 1886, and what should our lady of the high Cs do
but have a crisis of conscience right there on stage. Yes, folks.
After thinking about it a bit dur­ing the trumpet music (you can tell from
her brow-furrowed closeups), she suddenly rises and
advances to stage front. Dragging with her a pair of aston­ished-looking
extras dressed as Ethio­pian prisoners, she delivers a thoughtful,
impassioned "Free the slaves" speech to the Rio audience and the
imperial box, containing one Phi­lippe Noiret. Emperor Phil looks
on aghast, like the rest of us. Then he walks out in the nearest state he can
find, under stress, to high dudgeon. But Liz, God bless her, carries on. So
does the film, into higher flights of certifiable lunacy. The slaves were
freed two years later. And you'd think from this slice of history-as-bunk
that we owed it all to Toscanini-Taylor. This movie should secure Zeffirelli a sound place in immortality. It's the first
film that an audience has both laughed at and booed, an accomplishment of
sorts.

After Wacky Weekend,
anything went at Venice. Preceded by an advance guard of re-titled Hollywood
biggies – including Buon Giorno Viet­nam and Qui Ha Incastrato Roger Rab­bit – the Scorsese outrage arrived. The
Italian clergy was waiting. Only a month before, at a meet-the-foreign-press
party at his CastelGandolfo
sum­mer retreat, the Pope, replying to a question about Poland, had used the
phrase "Lead me not into temptation." Decoders of papal ambiguity,
to whom a nod is as good as an encyclical, rushed straight to the telephones.
"He's gun­ning for the Scorsese," they barked into the
mouthpieces.

Actually, after all
the buildup, there was only anti-climax. A brief demo in St. Mark's Square, a
score of mounted cops armed for trouble outside the Pal­azzo Del Cinéma, and that was it. No
trouble, nothing. Weeks of threats and thunderings
from the kamikaze Chris­tians vowing to hurl themselves flam­ing into the
fracas ("Our motto: Apocalypse Now") ended only in a Church
pronouncement that Catholics shouldn't see the film. This puts Marty on a par
with James Joyce and is tanta­mount to secular canonization.

Still, it all provided
yards of free international publicity for Venice and much exciting
cloak-and-dagger shadow play up to and into the fest.
If
Guglielmo Biraghi can survive this, he
can survive anything: even the last-day surprise of a Golden Lion to the Olmi film.
(Jury – get thee into the lagoon). Let's hope Biraghidoes survive. For now–Ciao,buon giorno, arrivederci,and my gosh, there's a Vatican hit man
trying to sink my gondola.